Quiz Shows En France
So you end up in a Paris hotel room in the early evening, exhausted from wandering up the Champs Elysee and going to the top of the Grand Arch at La Defense and you start watching les quiz shows. It's only natural, as Crowded House once sang.
Allant pour Or?
I'd seen Questions pour un champion on Sky digital on TV5 before, so obviously I knew all about how it was the basis for the BBC's Going for Gold and Channel 5's One to Win (the latter of which stirs queasy feelings in myself once I remember how disastrous my one attempt at it was).
Presented by Michael Keaton lookalike Julien Lepers, Questions is the hardy perennial of all French quiz shows and is reliably good, even if I couldn't understand any questions that didn't involve the names of actual persons (I got The Wild Bunch on four points, well, I would have if I could remember the French title properly; this was despite my actually seeing the DVD in a Virgin Megastore earlier in the day ... I knew "Sauvage", but what in living crikey was "Bunch"?). The show goes on and on and has intellectuals in the audience being bafflingly asked to make comments on indie bands like Placebo and will go on for sometime yet. Long may it run (I may even remember to watch here if I can be bothered).
And yes, I must confess, when Lepers brought out the board game at the end, I spent quite a few hours combing Parisian department stores for it. Alas, it could not be found and brought back to Blighty. Tant pis.
Millionaire Over There
Just after on another channel was the French version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (Why "Millions"? It's one and it's in Euros. Blatant false advertising if you ask me).
As expected it looked exactly like every single version all over the world. After all if it ain't broke, why fix it? The only difference, apart from the gradations going up in smaller increments (for instance, the 14th question was for 300,000 Euros, probably because they are cheapskates across La Manche) was that they had introduced the "Switch" (or as it has been called in the UK, the "Flip") option to add to the four lifelines. Perhaps, it is time to introduce it here, because who knows, it might help one or two more to the magic million pound jackpot.
The presenter looked disturbingly like GMTV presenter John Stapleton, only with a smooth dead rat's pelt for a hairpiece instead of rugged, broken down Watchdog looks and locks. Actually, he looked more like Ted's room-mate from Hi-De-Hi!. That Jeffrey Hollland fella.
Yet I was more disturbed by the lack of vitesse displayed in the Fastest Finger First rounds. More than nine and a half seconds was needed for ordering the South American countries of Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and Uruguay by size and the same again for works-by-age from Homer, Voltaire, Zola and Camus.
Such contestants would be left eating the dust with Bearnaise sauce of Brits over here with their four-second winning times. Chris suggested they were more relaxed over there, you know, they smoke a Gitane and ponder Baudrillard before putting finger to button, which could be right of course. But really, quizzers who don't speak a word of English, could beat them hands down.
Apart from that it was slightly boring (blame it on the language barrier). I could go on at how shouty I got when one guy bailed out after failing to identify which parts of the body are affected by labyrinthitis (a word I can't say properly, like festishistic) but, you know. It might get boring.
Remembering Lydia
But before Millions and on at the same time as Questions was Cresus. It intrigued me most of all because it uses for part of the show the same face-on-screen duels that Grand Slam did. Ooh, I remember. In fact I get a little wistful these days about such a format. Take away the nasty numbers and the larrikin letters rounds, and I would be practically be begging for the show to be resurrected in general knowledge form. I could at least be guaranteed to get out the answers rapidly, if not too efficiently, which is more crucial to winning in that particular format.
The lady who had won the day, and typically as all such more mature females on French TV looked like Catherine Deneuve's slightly less striking sister, went through to the final with the presenter playing to the camera by pretending to fall asleep whenever she was hesitating (coquettishly, might I add), when she came upon the question asking for the name of Hagrid's three-headed dog in the Harry Potter books, and did a great impersonation of someone sprinting headlong into a brick wall.
She lost three lives and any hope of hundreds of thousands of Euros before deciding that "Touflu" was the correct answer (forgive me for the spelling, it might have been "Touffu"). Of course, me and my fellow holiday makers knew it was Fluffy in English, but we could tell it was nothing like "poilu", "velu" or "barbu".
It only goes to show that Harry Potter facts should be learned for all quiz contestants' safety all over the world, such is the books' mind-boggling popularity.
The presenter Vincent Lagaf was actually pretty good, even if he looked disconcertingly like Michael Chiklis from The Shield wearing one of those dodgy silver underbeards that shaven headed Frenchman appear to like cultivating.
However, the only utterly inexplicable thing about Cresus was the computer-animated comedy sidekick to Lagaf's straight man; I believe his name was Stefan. If Stefan was a disembodied voice imparting pearls of fine quiz wisdom in silky tones then that would have been be acceptable, but being computer-derived he was got up as a cheeky skeleton wearing a pin-stripe suit and equally violent and contrasting shirt and tie. He annoyed the living bejesus out of me. How could the French have thought up such a diabolical creation?
"His" one mission in the whole show was to make asides and strange comments and score updates, while swinging backwards and forwards as if his motor skills had been annihilated by a selection of fine Bordeaux wines. That was all. Oh yeah, and make hilariously topical comments about Fidel Castro delegating power to his dear brother Raoul. How the audience broke into peals of rolling laughter!
Yes, this was a French quiz show indeed. Trust them to make their version of Buzz Lightyear into a camp politico.
And his annoying squawky voice: it was the kind of voice that drives you to distraction and possible armed insurrection against its instigator. Soon after the show finished, the quiz element swiftly faded from memory and I was left with this mental image of a garishly-garbed and quite possibly gay skeleton lunging in all directions guaranteed to annoy me for the rest of my days. The curse of a good but selective memory strikes again.
It did get me thinking though: take away Skeletor and you might have a decent transferable format that would work here. When I say work, I mean have one series and then be shunted off to game show heaven. As is the fashion of most quiz formats here in the UK. I could tsk and tut-tut all day about the lack of patience shown by programme makers here. And indeed I have in the past many times.
Morons
And so the glorious, insightful thing I have concluded and brought back here to reveal to yonder blog readers like a veritable Dr Robert Langdon or someone else equally genial (NOT) is that because Francophone TV is so absolutely rubbish it creates the perfect environment for quiz shows such as Questions pour un champion to thrive. This is because naffness of the whole schedule, filled by It's a Knockout and Treasure Hunt-a-likes on primetime TV - formats we have long dumped in the rubbish bin in this country to make way for shows about liposuction and buying houses in Slovakia - saves the quiz show.
If we were more naff in this country and less inclined to taking notice of the supposed detrimental effect of having older audience members who smell of wee and want to buy products to combat constipation, then we might still have our beloved Fifteen-to-One, or even Going for Gold (which is better than nothing in many ways). But no, programme makers and commissioning editors desire youthful viewers with highlights in their hair and practically nothing in their head. Kids with money ready to spend on advertising for mobile phones and hair products. I cannot hide my contempt for such brazen idiots.
They have never recognised the appetite and need for a durable, reliable product: one that isn't too ambitious, but one that retains a fierce, loyal audience who deal out their patronage in return for a dose of regular, sometimes daily, assured excellence. Instead, they view them with suspicion and are always looking for something new and shiny. Witness their fruitless attempts to do away with Countdown, for instance. They keep it because of the tumultuous uproar evinced by whispers and rumours of yanking it off air. Yet again, if it ain't broke, why wipe it out of existence. Buffoons one and all.
Loyalty is a good thing in this wondrous, murky and weird world. Far too little is made of it with regard to quiz shows, which are cast aside as cheap, schedules filler by people who want to be one with the achingly hip.
So yeah! Bring back Fifteen-to-One! Not filler, but all killer. That's what this all really boils down to.
Let the call go across the land (and fall on deaf ears yet again ... sigh ... grrr).
Allant pour Or?
I'd seen Questions pour un champion on Sky digital on TV5 before, so obviously I knew all about how it was the basis for the BBC's Going for Gold and Channel 5's One to Win (the latter of which stirs queasy feelings in myself once I remember how disastrous my one attempt at it was).
Presented by Michael Keaton lookalike Julien Lepers, Questions is the hardy perennial of all French quiz shows and is reliably good, even if I couldn't understand any questions that didn't involve the names of actual persons (I got The Wild Bunch on four points, well, I would have if I could remember the French title properly; this was despite my actually seeing the DVD in a Virgin Megastore earlier in the day ... I knew "Sauvage", but what in living crikey was "Bunch"?). The show goes on and on and has intellectuals in the audience being bafflingly asked to make comments on indie bands like Placebo and will go on for sometime yet. Long may it run (I may even remember to watch here if I can be bothered).
And yes, I must confess, when Lepers brought out the board game at the end, I spent quite a few hours combing Parisian department stores for it. Alas, it could not be found and brought back to Blighty. Tant pis.
Millionaire Over There
Just after on another channel was the French version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (Why "Millions"? It's one and it's in Euros. Blatant false advertising if you ask me).
As expected it looked exactly like every single version all over the world. After all if it ain't broke, why fix it? The only difference, apart from the gradations going up in smaller increments (for instance, the 14th question was for 300,000 Euros, probably because they are cheapskates across La Manche) was that they had introduced the "Switch" (or as it has been called in the UK, the "Flip") option to add to the four lifelines. Perhaps, it is time to introduce it here, because who knows, it might help one or two more to the magic million pound jackpot.
The presenter looked disturbingly like GMTV presenter John Stapleton, only with a smooth dead rat's pelt for a hairpiece instead of rugged, broken down Watchdog looks and locks. Actually, he looked more like Ted's room-mate from Hi-De-Hi!. That Jeffrey Hollland fella.
Yet I was more disturbed by the lack of vitesse displayed in the Fastest Finger First rounds. More than nine and a half seconds was needed for ordering the South American countries of Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and Uruguay by size and the same again for works-by-age from Homer, Voltaire, Zola and Camus.
Such contestants would be left eating the dust with Bearnaise sauce of Brits over here with their four-second winning times. Chris suggested they were more relaxed over there, you know, they smoke a Gitane and ponder Baudrillard before putting finger to button, which could be right of course. But really, quizzers who don't speak a word of English, could beat them hands down.
Apart from that it was slightly boring (blame it on the language barrier). I could go on at how shouty I got when one guy bailed out after failing to identify which parts of the body are affected by labyrinthitis (a word I can't say properly, like festishistic) but, you know. It might get boring.
Remembering Lydia
But before Millions and on at the same time as Questions was Cresus. It intrigued me most of all because it uses for part of the show the same face-on-screen duels that Grand Slam did. Ooh, I remember. In fact I get a little wistful these days about such a format. Take away the nasty numbers and the larrikin letters rounds, and I would be practically be begging for the show to be resurrected in general knowledge form. I could at least be guaranteed to get out the answers rapidly, if not too efficiently, which is more crucial to winning in that particular format.
The lady who had won the day, and typically as all such more mature females on French TV looked like Catherine Deneuve's slightly less striking sister, went through to the final with the presenter playing to the camera by pretending to fall asleep whenever she was hesitating (coquettishly, might I add), when she came upon the question asking for the name of Hagrid's three-headed dog in the Harry Potter books, and did a great impersonation of someone sprinting headlong into a brick wall.
She lost three lives and any hope of hundreds of thousands of Euros before deciding that "Touflu" was the correct answer (forgive me for the spelling, it might have been "Touffu"). Of course, me and my fellow holiday makers knew it was Fluffy in English, but we could tell it was nothing like "poilu", "velu" or "barbu".
It only goes to show that Harry Potter facts should be learned for all quiz contestants' safety all over the world, such is the books' mind-boggling popularity.
The presenter Vincent Lagaf was actually pretty good, even if he looked disconcertingly like Michael Chiklis from The Shield wearing one of those dodgy silver underbeards that shaven headed Frenchman appear to like cultivating.
However, the only utterly inexplicable thing about Cresus was the computer-animated comedy sidekick to Lagaf's straight man; I believe his name was Stefan. If Stefan was a disembodied voice imparting pearls of fine quiz wisdom in silky tones then that would have been be acceptable, but being computer-derived he was got up as a cheeky skeleton wearing a pin-stripe suit and equally violent and contrasting shirt and tie. He annoyed the living bejesus out of me. How could the French have thought up such a diabolical creation?
"His" one mission in the whole show was to make asides and strange comments and score updates, while swinging backwards and forwards as if his motor skills had been annihilated by a selection of fine Bordeaux wines. That was all. Oh yeah, and make hilariously topical comments about Fidel Castro delegating power to his dear brother Raoul. How the audience broke into peals of rolling laughter!
Yes, this was a French quiz show indeed. Trust them to make their version of Buzz Lightyear into a camp politico.
And his annoying squawky voice: it was the kind of voice that drives you to distraction and possible armed insurrection against its instigator. Soon after the show finished, the quiz element swiftly faded from memory and I was left with this mental image of a garishly-garbed and quite possibly gay skeleton lunging in all directions guaranteed to annoy me for the rest of my days. The curse of a good but selective memory strikes again.
It did get me thinking though: take away Skeletor and you might have a decent transferable format that would work here. When I say work, I mean have one series and then be shunted off to game show heaven. As is the fashion of most quiz formats here in the UK. I could tsk and tut-tut all day about the lack of patience shown by programme makers here. And indeed I have in the past many times.
Morons
And so the glorious, insightful thing I have concluded and brought back here to reveal to yonder blog readers like a veritable Dr Robert Langdon or someone else equally genial (NOT) is that because Francophone TV is so absolutely rubbish it creates the perfect environment for quiz shows such as Questions pour un champion to thrive. This is because naffness of the whole schedule, filled by It's a Knockout and Treasure Hunt-a-likes on primetime TV - formats we have long dumped in the rubbish bin in this country to make way for shows about liposuction and buying houses in Slovakia - saves the quiz show.
If we were more naff in this country and less inclined to taking notice of the supposed detrimental effect of having older audience members who smell of wee and want to buy products to combat constipation, then we might still have our beloved Fifteen-to-One, or even Going for Gold (which is better than nothing in many ways). But no, programme makers and commissioning editors desire youthful viewers with highlights in their hair and practically nothing in their head. Kids with money ready to spend on advertising for mobile phones and hair products. I cannot hide my contempt for such brazen idiots.
They have never recognised the appetite and need for a durable, reliable product: one that isn't too ambitious, but one that retains a fierce, loyal audience who deal out their patronage in return for a dose of regular, sometimes daily, assured excellence. Instead, they view them with suspicion and are always looking for something new and shiny. Witness their fruitless attempts to do away with Countdown, for instance. They keep it because of the tumultuous uproar evinced by whispers and rumours of yanking it off air. Yet again, if it ain't broke, why wipe it out of existence. Buffoons one and all.
Loyalty is a good thing in this wondrous, murky and weird world. Far too little is made of it with regard to quiz shows, which are cast aside as cheap, schedules filler by people who want to be one with the achingly hip.
So yeah! Bring back Fifteen-to-One! Not filler, but all killer. That's what this all really boils down to.
Let the call go across the land (and fall on deaf ears yet again ... sigh ... grrr).
posted by That Quiz Guy at 7:48 PM
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